APRIL 28TH, 2019: SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER Acts 5:12-16
Revelation 1:8-11a, 12-13, 17-19
John 20:19-31 One of the reasons Luke composed a double volume gospel revolves around his belief that whatever Jesus does in the gospel, the Christian community also does in Acts. Though he doesn’t directly employ Paul’s image of the Body of Christ, he certainly shares his theology. It’s up to us to continue Jesus’ work. No matter what he accomplished during his earthly ministry, if we refuse to carry his ministry forward, it remains unfinished.
Only other Christs can pull that off. That’s why we should be well-versed in both understanding and copying Jesus’ personality. The second point is most important. As the late Fr. Dan Berigan insisted, “Our task is to become Christians, not experts on Christianity.” Luke constantly reminds his community that it isn’t what we know but what we do. And based on today’s first reading, one of the main things we do is heal, even going beyond just healing physically. That seems to be why Luke includes in his cures “those disturbed by unclean spirits.” In the evangelist’s day and age, unclean spirits were thought responsible for all evils, not just moral evils. For instance, those with mental problems were believed to have as many demons in them as someone afflicted with cancer.
Following that line of thought, John’s Jesus, on the night of his resurrection, gifts his disciples with the Holy Spirit, enabling them to forgive one another’s sins. Nothing rids us of our demons more than forgiving and being forgiven. Both help us create the kind of world the risen Jesus envisions.
Yet, as the author of Revelation states, unless we keep the risen Jesus as the “first and last” of our lives, we’ll be trapped in our humdrum existence. Only he/she provides us the life for which we dream, as long as we remain participants and not just spectators.
One of the key elements in our participation can easily be overlooked – at least I overlooked it until recently. When John’s Jesus reminds Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed,” we correctly include ourselves in that number. Yet at the same time, there’s usually a group we leave out: our sacred authors. All scholars tell us that no one who physically came in contact with the historical Jesus ever wrote anything about him that we have today. None of our sacred authors – including the evangelists – directly heard or saw Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus who lived between 6 BCE and 30 CE. They, like we, encountered only the risen Jesus. Everything we read in our Christian Scriptures has come down to us from those who have not seen, yet believe. If they didn’t pass on their second and third generation reflections to fourth and fifth generation Christians, we’d have no Christian Scriptures.
Obviously no one alive today has had an experience of the historical Jesus. Along with our sacred authors, we can only have contact with the risen Jesus. Though we might sluff off our risen Jesus experiences as insignificant, thankfully our Christian biblical writers didn’t share that state of mind. Rembert Weakland, the former archbishop of Milwaukee, once wrote that all Christians have an obligation to put their risen Jesus experiences into a format others can later surface. The Spirit didn’t share them with us for our benefit alone.
Hard to tell what that format would entail. (Weakland suggested that, given specific circumstances, it could simply be a letter to the editor of our local newspaper.) Though I imagine few of us will ever write a gospel, we should at least share our reflections with certain family members or close friends. Just as our sacred authors have helped us, we might be a help to others – people who we don’t realize need them.
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